What is Health anyway?

This question is one that has occupied my thoughts on more than one occasion lately. Although each of us may have our own personal definition of what health is, I would like to share what mine is.

To build on my definition, I would like to go back to my days as a chemistry student. In the study of physical science such topics as Light and Heat are discussed at great length. Each of these topics have their opposites. The opposite of Light is darkness and the opposite of Heat is coldness. But here we see a problem. Although we talk about light and darkness as two opposing forces, but is darkness actually a thing? Light as we know is are forms of energy that we can see with our eyes. If we block them we can form a shadow of darkness, but the darkness is not a thing, it is simply the lack of visible energy we call light. The same can be said about coldness. Heat is thermal energy, we make it by using different types of friction like rubbing two sticks to make a fire or increasing the electrical current creating electron friction in a piece of metal. We cannot create coldness however. Even in your refrigerator we are not creating cold we are simply removing the heat out the back. If you don't believe me feel the back of your refrigerator some time. So we see that like darkness, coldness is not a thing, it is simply the removal or blocking of heat.

So what does any of this science talk have to do with Health? I am glad you asked. Like light and heat, health has an opposite as well by the name of disease. What is disease, in the medical world it is a list of repeatable signs and symptoms that are present in a person. But why are the signs and symptoms there in the first place? I believe that they are there simply because the person has lost a bit of their ability to heal on their own. I present to you that health is what a person is missing when they are "sick" instead of having a disease. Health is the persons ability to adapt to the environmental forces that they encounter on a daily basis. These forces can come in the form of physical trauma, chemical toxins, or emotional stresses that bombard us all the time. When we lose this ability to adapt we become "sick", not because we caught something, but because like darkness and coldness, disease is not a thing it is the lack of health.

So in review health is our ability to adapt to our environment and withstand the external forces that continually pound on us. If we do not have enough health we fall to these forces and become "sick". Our goal is then to be proactive and seek out health rather then run away from disease (or lack of health).

-Mike E